3.06.2012

The Wall Street Journal is conducting a live chat on the health effects of video games based on research at Simon Fraser University in Canada utilizing the StarCraft II platform.

Here's the lead-in:

Computer games can change your brain, and researchers are finding that those changes can improve creativity, decision-making, concentration and dexterity. The violent action games that worry parents the most also have the strongest beneficial effect on the brain, government-funded researchers at independent laboratories in the US and Europe have reported.

In the largest public study of electronic gaming so far, Mark Blair at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, is turning the games themselves into a laboratory for learning. He is analyzing the behavior of 150,000 people who play a popular online game called StarCraft II, to learn how new knowledge and experience can become second nature, integrated into the way we react to the world around us.